1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a system to radius and smooth a microhole, such as a microhole in a fuel injection nozzle.
2. Description of Related Art
In many applications, such as fuel injector nozzle tips, carburetor jets, cooling air flow through turbine engine components, lubricating oil metering for precision bearings and the like, metering of flow rates is of very great importance. However, due to manufacturing artifacts, it is of great difficulty. Even minute variations in manufacturing tolerances can produce substantial variations in flow resistance and flow.
Parts having fluid flow orifices are made by a wide variety of casting and machining procedures. For example, high quality investment castings are frequently employed for the manufacture of such parts. Even the high quality parts will have variations in dimensions, particularly wall thicknesses attributable to slight core misalignments or core shifting, and other variations in surface conditions, including surface roughness, pits, nicks, gouges, blow holes, or positive metal. In the extreme case, a very slight crack in a core can lead to a thin wall projecting into an internal passage. All these artifacts will substantially impede fluid flow.
Commonly employed machining methods, such as conventional drilling, electrical discharge machining and even less usual techniques as laser, electron beam and electrochemical techniques are not sufficiently precise to avoid the generation of substantial variations in flow resistance. Probably, the most precise of these, electrical discharge machining, will not produce perfectly uniform flow resistance because non-uniform EDM conditions are inevitable and may produce variations in size, shape, surface finish and hole edge conditions.
Such deviations are necessarily tolerated within broad limits and the attendant compromises in design freedom, performance and efficiency are accepted as unavoidable. For example, the delivery of fuel charges to internal combustion engines by pressurized fuel injection requires metering of flow through injector nozzles. The more precisely the flow can be regulated, the greater the fuel efficiency and economy of the engine operation.
At present, the design of such fuel injector nozzles is often based on the measurement of the actual flow resistance. The nozzles are segregated into different ranges of flow parameters to provide at least approximate matching of components within a range of deviation from defined tolerances. The inventory requirements for the matching of components is quite substantial and therefore very costly. In addition, a substantial number of components must be rejected as out of allowable deviations and must be reworked at considerable expense or discarded.
With diesel fuel injector nozzles, it has been found desirable to radius the inlet side of the injector microholes in order to eliminate stress risers and pre-radius the upstream edge to minimize changes in emissions over the design life of the nozzle. Conventional abrasive flow machining can effectively produce radii on microholes, but fine control of the final injector flow rate has been impossible to achieve. The high, putty-like viscosity and highly elastic character of conventional abrasive flow media are too radically different from the characteristics of diesel fuel to permit either in-process gauging or adaptive control of this process. Furthermore, the very small quantity of abrasive flow media required to produce the desired radius limits process resolution.
Briefly, in abrasive flow machining (AFM) of microholes the flow rate of the material does not correlate well to the flow rate of the target liquid. Therefore, the actual calibration of a microhole is a step-by-step fine tuning process. After radiusing and smoothing the microhole with AFM, the target liquid or calibration liquid is tested in the microhole, the microhole is further worked and the target liquid or calibration liquid is again tested, etcetera, until the target liquid tests correctly.
The aforementioned problems were overcome to a considerable degree with the system disclosed in PCT Publication WO 97/05989. This publication discloses the use of a liquid abrasive slurry having rheological properties. When the flow rate of the slurry through the microholes of a nozzle reaches a predetermined flow rate, the process stops and the microholes are properly radiused and smoothed.